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Friday, September 9, 2016

In his latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Donald Trump’s ‘Big Liar’ Technique," Paul Krugman would have us examine the lies of Donald Trump, but ignore those of Hillary ("She stands accused of being overly legalistic or overstating the extent to which she has been cleared, but not of making major claims that are completely at odds with reality"). Krugman would have us know:

"Donald Trump has come up with something new, which we can call the 'big liar' technique. Taken one at a time, his lies are medium-size — not trivial, but mostly not rising to the level of blood libel. But the lies are constant, coming in a steady torrent, and are never acknowledged, simply repeated. He evidently believes that this strategy will keep the news media flummoxed, unable to believe, or at least say openly, that the candidate of a major party lies that much."

Okay, Trump employs the "big liar" technique and suffers from a severe narcissistic personality disorder; he should not be president of the United States. But what about Hillary's "adaptive liar" technique? As observed by Marc Thiessen in a Washington Post opinion piece entitled "Hillary Clinton fails the ABCs of handling classified information" (my emphasis in red):

"The fact is, every single person in America with even the lowest level of security clearance knows what (C) means. Clinton served on the Senate Armed Services Committee, where she regularly received classified information with a (C) marking on it. As secretary of state, she likely read classified documents with (C) markings every single day. And we’re supposed to believe she thought it was an alphabetical marking?

This was a fantastical argument for anyone with a security clearance, but it was totally lacking in credibility for someone with her proven pattern of deceit. Clinton has repeatedly changed her story: First, she told us there was “no classified material” in her private emails (which the FBI says was untrue). Then she told us there was nothing “classified at the time” (which the FBI also says was also untrue). Finally, she told us there was nothing “marked classified” in her private emails (which the FBI says was also untrue). So now she tells FBI interviewers that she does not know what (C) means, and they believe her?"

1 comment:

"...One of the paradoxes—there are so many—of conservative thought over the last decade at least is the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad. On the one hand, conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege. And so on and drearily on. Like that portion of the mass where the priest asks for your private intentions, fill in any dismal fact about American decline that you want and I’ll stipulate it. ...

All of Trump’s 16 Republican competitors would have ensured more of the same—as will the election of Hillary Clinton. That would be bad enough. But at least Republicans are merely reactive when it comes to wholesale cultural and political change. Their “opposition” may be in all cases ineffectual and often indistinguishable from support. But they don’t dream up inanities like 32 “genders,” elective bathrooms, single-payer, Iran sycophancy, “Islamophobia,” and Black Lives Matter. They merely help ratify them.

A Hillary presidency will be pedal-to-the-metal on the entire Progressive-left agenda, plus items few of us have yet imagined in our darkest moments. Nor is even that the worst. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else. ..."